Avant did very well a few years ago but after some nasty losses, they pretty much stopped communicating and folded up. No emails were answered, no more trades. They just unplugged themselves from the service.

They no longer exist as a service, even though the website is still up. Stay away from this service. The low-rated reviews you see here reflect the truth.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

I suggest reading their early reviews from 2012-early 2013 when people thought that this is an ATM machine. When I posted a comment warning people how risky those strategies are, they accused me of bashing a competitor. Few months later, they lost 80%+ and went out of business.

There are few other services implementing similar strategies. When it works, they look like geniuses. At some point, it stops working because the markets make a big move. But then it's too late.

From Jan 2013 to Aug of 2013 they took a 50k account down to 15k. For the last few months they did not post the actual in and out trades and when questioned said they were the same trades being rolled forward to future months. That is BS because they may have been rolling forward but they had to close out one months options as they opened new ones in the next month forward. I can not recommend their service to anyone.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

I subscribed to Avant Options earlier this year on the basis of good reviews on this site and StockGumshoe. Unfortunately the performance has been terrible and the losses have been substantial. They did not choose the right strategies and continued to try and predict the market direction. They also did not close out losing trades but chose to continue to roll them over further extending losses. The worst part is they have cancelled my subscription without any notification and when questioned about it they admitted that they were no longer operating due to the poor performance but their website seems to still be accepting new subscriptions. Save your money and choose another service.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

Agree 100%. Huge losses and very poor trade management. Not surprised they closed the service. Existing subscribers would be crazy to continue. Losses happen when trading. It's how you manage them that counts. Avant failed, failed and failed again.

Agree completely. They have created a mess and any specific questions about their plan / approach going forward are met with content free responses as if to say "trust us, we know what we are doing," except they do not.

As of 9/19/2013 they have pretty much blown up everyone's account. 4 positions which were rolled several times. 3 (2 SPY and 1 DIA) closed today for almost 100% loss on each one before commissions. Last position (IWM) right on the borderline of closing ITM or OTM but will still probably be a loss overall due to several rolls and commission. Trades handled very unprofessionally, poor communication with clients and amateurish responses to reasonable questions from clients. My own fault for not bailing earlier. Caveat emptor my friends.

They said in the website that's they consistently achieve targeted annual returns of 20-40% while minimizing drawdowns and overall risk. This is not true. they currently have 4 positions credit spread that are in loss position and in deep money. I would say for unrealized lose. they lose 80% of Portfolio now.

They have a big loss in June/July/august cycle ( not loss yet in their opinion since they now roll all positions again to September ). I subscribe their service since the beginning of this year and they have had the big loss in March, May and now. The track record on their website is not updated with their rolled positions. You will see that they have less positions in April and May because They rolled all of their losing call spread positions out to June, then July, August and September.

I thought they learned and can improve their service. But seems they will never learn. I should have just canceled the service since March.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

I tested Avant Options performance for the first 5 months of 2013, autotraded via GAT/IB. I also autotrade a few other similar newsletters and while I can't comment on their performance outside of this period, the losses during the first half of 2013 far exceeded all of the others. I think their are two primary reasons for this:

1) they badly misread the market during what has been a vigorous bull run. Putting over 75% of their positions on bear call spreads caused inevitable losses. The drivers for the current bull run could be debated, but to ignore the effects of QE1 & 2 on market behaviour since 2009 right on the heels of the QE3 announcement has to take quite some justification.

2) Finding themselves the wrong side of the market they two times made (in my opionion) reckless gambles. The first time was in March when positions were rolled up to the next strike with less than $1 of intrinsic. It is to their credit that they subsequently posted a mea-culpa analysis and promised never to take this type of risk again. Nonetheless a month later as positions once again got dangerously close to being rolled they posted their intention to do exactly the same thing again, thankfully the market backed off a tad and prevented the need for a repeat of the same gamble.

However, in May they rolled all of their losing call spread positions out and DOWN. Once again a big gamble which counted on a sharp pull back in market prices to pay off. This was the point when I decided enough was enough and took over unwinding their positions myself.

Over the long haul they may deliver a good return for subscribers, and some may be comfortable with their casino-style approach to reading market direction and adjusting loss-making positions, however I found their approach to risk management to be anything but conservative and not in-line with my risk tolerance.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

6/10/2013: I agree with Spreadn all the way. They have just rolled strikes out again to July but with little margin for error. Looked OK the day the rolls were done (the couple of down days) and now the July short strikes on the calls have all been breached and we are back where we started. Only bright side is that the put spreads have high credits so that may help offset the problem with the calls. Might have to look at unwinding the trades myself as well.

Well, technically roll is just closing an old trade (usually for a loss) and opening a new one. It is a good way to hide losses.

You can read my article http://steadyoptions.com/articles/post/general/can-you-really-make-10-per-month-with-iron-con-r45 to see why it is so dangerous to place 70-80% of your account into credit spreads.

Review Updated

Not much to add to the previous testimonial regarding Avant options. Another big weakness of their service from my point of view is that they trade several indexes at the same time and in the same direction (in this case bearish for the March cycle). But those indexes are anyway highly correlated. If one trade goes wrong you can be nearly sure that the other ones will be losing trades as well. So why trading several indexes when one single trade on one of them would lead to the same result at the end? Why paying 4 times as much commission fees? Because it is probably more sexy to show a portfolio with several positions instead of only one... Furthermore Avant Options doesn’t give any rationale about why they enter their trades, which strikes they chose, why bearish or bullish, etc. Seems as if they would trust to chance or just make their decisions based on basic overbought/oversold market indicators, which as we know, do not work very well in trendy markets.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

Pretty amazing how a service going from 5 stars to 1 star after one bad month..

Most people (especially those who autotrade) just don't understand that what happened in March was inevitable, and it's only matter of time till it happens again.

Looking at Avant track record, here are just few issues with what they do:

1. The timing of the trades - it is too close to expiration, and the negative gamma is too high.2. The credits - they are too low for the risk taken, so one big market move (not to mention a black swan event) will wipe out months of profits.3. They open few trades to "diversify" - in fact, SPY, QQQ, DIA and IWM have 90%+ correlation. This is not diversification.4. They try to time the market by legging into the condors. It is great when it works - till it doesn't, and when it doesn't, you are screwed from all directions.

The nature of high probability iron condors is that they make money 80% of the time. The trick is not to allow the losses to be much higher than an average gain. With such high negative gamma, this is almost impossible task.

kimk is a publisher of his own newsletter service utilizing a different style of trading(calendars/strangles/straddles). His bashing of a different trading style (credit spreads) of a competing service is a very unprofessional marketing method for your newsletter and does not garner respect of readers or those of us in the industry

Addressing Carcharadon’s comments, your comments are appreciated. Losses are experienced in any trading style and March’s performance was within our normal trading limits. We have done a through post mortem analysis of March’s trades available here: http://www.avantoptions.com/post-mortem

Of your 2 of your other Investimonials reviews, each one is extremely negative about the product or service and we wish you the best in your pursuit of a newsletter that meets your goals and objectives.

Well thanks for the feedback AvantOptions. I would be interested to know which service Kimk is publishing. Because if he does something different than what you do, I would like to give him a chance. Your "post-mortem" analysis did not really help to "reanimate" you. You are still making the same mistakes: still fighting the overall market trend, still trading 3 or 4 different ETFs which are highly correlated. When one of them goes wrong, the other ones are losing as well. And above all, there is definitely no "brain" behind what you do: it is the same every month: 3 weeks prior expiration you open the same spreads with strikes between 2 and 4.5% away from the underlying price, hoping being able to build an iron condor some days later. And yes I tested already a lot of newsletters and my feedbacks are mainly negative. The reason for that is that the majority of those services are simply scam and a danger for lemmings following them blindly. Your service belongs to that category.

I did not bash anyone, just mentioned some basic facts. It's unfortunate that instead of commenting on those facts, you have chosen to attack me personally. I have nothing personal against you, I just think that any service that trades credit spreads only and recommends placing 60-80% of the account into those trades is misleading its subscribers by letting them to believe that this is a conservative strategy. In fact, it's only matter of time till the account loses 50-60% or more, especially when opening those trades so close to expiration.

Please note that I did not mention the name of my service. I trade credit spreads too, but I never allocate more than 20% of the account to them and always hedge with gamma positive trades. Carcharadon, you can contact me at [email protected] for details. Hint: my service is ranked #1 in the options category.

I would like to mention the management of the trades of Avant Option for the March options cycle to make people aware of how unprofessional this service is.

They opened around the 22nd of February a bunch of bear call spreads on several indexes (S&P, Dow Jones, Russel, etc.). They were accordingly trading against the bullish momentum of the markets. One or two days later the markets fell, bringing the open positions in a temporary winning area. Avant Options was quick in sending an email celebrating themselves about how excellent their timing was... The problem is that the markets rallied since then. Apart from a meagre bull put spread opened on the SPY, they kept all bearish positions until a couple of days ago where the first tremendous losses were finally cut.

Avant Options felt great about their management and wrote how well they felt in cutting the losses timely enough. As such they manage to “sleep soundly at night”. And that’s also the reason why their strategy is so wonderful... Well, the problem is that just after having closed the losing positions on the Dow Jones (through the DIA ETF), they immediately opened a new bear call spread (only one strike higher than the previous losing spread) in order, as they claimed, to recoup the loss of the previous trade. No need to say how amateurish this is. Even a beginner in trading would not make such a mistake. And what should happen happened indeed. This position went wrong as well and additional tremendous losses were realised again.

Don’t be lured by the figures shown on the website: there is no sound strategy behind the trades of Avant Options. They are fighting the trend, the losses can be tremendous when they are on the wrong side of the market and the winning trades seem to be more the result of luck than the result of a technical or fundamental analysis.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC

This is the problem with those low credit Iron Condors. You can make 5-7% many months, and then one bad month erases 4-6 months of gains. When your maximum gain is 5-7%, you absolutely cannot afford to have 25-30% losses.

Serious_trades – Your comments are appreciated. Losses are experienced in any trading style and March’s performance was within our normal trading limits. We have done a through post mortem analysis of March’s trades available here: http://www.avantoptions.com/post-mortem

Of your 4 of your other Investimonials reviews, each one is negative about the product or service and we wish you the best in your pursuit of a newsletter that meets your goals and objectives.

I am a retired engineer and familiar with using probability for design. I have read many books on different trading and investing methods. I liked the iron condors and credit spreads and the probability used in trading with this method. I started using Avant Options a few months ago, and they save me the time and trouble of picking the trades. Plus they do not waste my time with useless e-mails and letters, or trying to sell you more services. They give you just what you need to know. I have not tried auto trading, but plan to look into it.

These trades are not riskless. If the market goes against you, the loss can be big. However, Avant Options is conservative, and makes geat recommendations. In reviewing the history of their trades, they have managed the risk very well. How many other newsletters give you the history of their trade recommendations? Most don't want you to know. It takes some work to understand the system, but it makes sense and works.

This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC